Mixtape Of The Week: Joey Bada$$ 1999

I don’t understand Joey Bada$$. I mean, I understand his music just fine. If you’ve listened to rap for long enough, you understand it, too. It’s the sort of warm, dusty, sun-faded boom-bap that New York rap crews were cranking out at a furious rate in, say, 1995. But what I don’t understand is how Joey Bada$$ exists. Because, as Corban writes in his BTW piece on Joey, Joey was born in 1995. He’s exactly the same age as the music he’s consciously evoking. What confounds me is that a high school kid from Flatbush is making music this era-specific, and, more importantly, that he’s so good at it. Even Joey references are as old as him. Here and there on his new debut mixtape 1999, he’ll quote a little piece of an old song in the way that only people intimately familiar with those songs would do: The breathless grunts from the intro to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation,” the “it’s the reeeeal” from the intro to Gang Star’s “You Know My Steez.” On “Righteous Minds,” he says, “I never knew the world could be this mad / Only vision I had of sex was Color Me Badd,” but Color Me Badd’s hits about sex came out before he was born. It’s uncanny, like he’s treating the mixtape as an actual time machine, only acknowledging a reality that still existed when he was a toddler. And when his entire Pro Era crew shows up on the tape-closing 12-minute posse cut “Suspect,” it sure sounds like there are a ton of kids doing the exact same thing as him. So: Is this a new thing? Or are Joey and his friends just an outlying radar-blip, like the group of kids I knew in high school who suddenly decided that they were all mods, riding Vespas and buying white jeans and shit?

Well, whatever. I don’t have to understand Joey Bada$$; I’m just glad he exists. Joey’s strength isn’t in being, specifically, a retro rapper. We’ve already got plenty of those; New York is overrun with aging legends mad at the way trend-shifts have made them obsolete, still cranking out their old-style music to diminishing returns. But Joey’s worth your attention because he’s just a very good rapper, an introverted stylist who’s got his own style completely figured out. In talking about Joey, a whole lot of people are bringing up Illmatic-era Nas, and the comparison makes sense. Joey’s got that same innate grasp of meter and that same pained old-beyond-his-years thousand-yard stare, and Nas wasn’t much older than him when he made Illmatic. But the comparison that jumps to mind most easily for me is Smif-N-Wessun, back when they made Dah Shinin. Joey’s got a wizened husk of a voice, just like Tek and Steele did, and his heretofore-unknown producers (primarily Chuck Strangers) mine the same ancient unquantized breakbeats and languidly mournful horn samples as Da Beatminerz did on that album. The production is so evocative that when Joey switches into rhyming over old beats from DOOM or Dilla or Lord Finesse, I almost don’t notice.

An important thing to note about Joey Bada$$: He doesn’t sound like a teenager, the way the Odd Future kids or Azealia Banks or Chief Keef or any number of other young rappers do. He’s got moments of hungry force in his delivery, but more often he’s sedate, cool with the assurance that he knows how to rap circles around his peers. That’s not a teenager’s approach to rapping, but he pulls it off absolutely. Another important thing: Unlike so many of the great rappers in New York’s suddenly-resurgent rap underground, he doesn’t radiate cooler-than-the-room snark. Guys like Das Racist and Action Bronson and Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire are funny, and they know it. Joey’s not, and he doesn’t try to be. Instead, he laces his boasts with an appealing sort of humble sincerity: “One day, I’m tryna have a wife and kids, so I just can’t live my life like this / And I ain’t tryna know what lifeless is, so I just can’t live my life like this.” He has nothing to do with the music happening around him, like he’s only just emerging from a bomb shelter stocked with videotaped episodes of Rap City. He’s a young man unstuck from time, but holy shit can he ever rap.

Wow. All so-called “next great rappers” have to get through this kid first. Given how young he is, how dense his lyrics are, the quality of his production, and the thematic content going on here, this is definitely a throwback to Illmatic. Not saying it’s as good or particularly close, but when a 17 year old drops a mixtape this good, the same sort of prodigiousness that Nas had at 19 is definitely there.

“and I’m putting in too many effort in my nouns and verbs like they gon’ catch up, fuck what you must heard“? Best line since, “I got some pussy that was insane, so insane, it’s an enemy of Bat-man“, am I right guys?

I don’t know, man. 2011 was pretty crazy. Great stuff from Danny Brown, The Roots, Kanye/Jay-Z, Shabazz Palaces, G-Side, 9th Wonder, Lil B, I could go on. Of course we got Killer Mike’s LP this year, which is better than most 2011 rap releases alone, and Kool A.D.’s second mixtape which is pretty cool, but other than that 2012 has been light.

Well, there’s Come On a Cone, which I like way way way way way way way more than I should.

Obviously that Killer Mike record is great but if you like that, El-P’s own record might even be a little better (though that’s just my slight preference, both are fire!) and this year also has Action Bronson, a killer Rozay mixtape, some solid Black Hippy stuff, that new Oddissee joint which (as a DC boy) I quite like, and Spaceghostpurpp (which I feel ought not to be my thing but I really like anyway).

Last year was killer (I love love love Shabazz, G-Side, DannyBrown/Despot/ExQuire, The Roots and even beyond that, Saigon, Doomtree, Kendrick Lamar, to name a few) but this year’s been great also.

Also, in 2012 there are going to be releases from ASAP Mob, ASAP Rocky, GOOD Music (it could bomb but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt just because of Mercy), Big Boi, Nas, possibly Earl?, Rebirth of Detroit, Freddie Gibbs’ & Madlib, and, at some point hopefully, Jay Electronica. Looks pretty good to me.

I’ve been bumping that Survival Tactics track for a while now. I preferred Capital STEEZ’s verse to Joey’s on that but this blasts STEEZ’s mixtape out of the water. The third verse on Hardknock is just…….wow!

I think we’re living in a fantastic time for underground Hip-Hop, with this guy, Killer Mike and El-P both putting out fantastic LP’s, Black Hippy, Odd Future and the whole Danny Brown/Das Racist/Despot/ Exquire crew.

Most Viewed

Jay Z bought the Swedish company Aspiro's streaming music service Tidal less than a month ago, but that didn't stop him from rolling out his rebranded product today with lots of fanfare from his famous friends. Rumors before the 5PM livestream suggested that Jay's newfangled Tidal would be launched with exclusive… More »

Jay Z is not playing with his big rollout of the streaming service Tidal. After many big stars tweeted their support last night, those same stars have shown up in a new 30-second spot for the service's big relaunch today. In the ad, we see a collection of luminaries -- Jay, Kanye West,… More »

Jay Z wants you to know that Tidal, the Scandinavian high-fidelity streaming service that he bought earlier this month, is a big deal. So he didn't just get some of music's biggest stars to tweet about the service's big relaunch, which is happening today. He got them all to change their social media… More »

Burger Records held their fourth annual Burgerama festival at the Observatory in Santa Ana this past weekend. The two-day fest featured appearances from bands like Together PANGEA, Fidlar, La Luz, Gang Of Four, Public Access T.V. and many, many more. Ty Segall and Weezer were the headliners, and Rivers Cuomo's dad Frank Cuomo made… More »

Father John Misty has been out on the road promoting his latest record, I Love You, Honeybear, for the past month and will continue to travel the country well into early summer. Photographer Tom Daly caught his set at Washington D.C.'s 9:30 Club, along with opener King Tuff, whose Black Moon Spell dropped last… More »